Motivational Life Coach Portland ME

Motivational life coaches help clients identify personal goals and look for ways to achieve them. They help people make life changes, take action, and stay focused. Motivational life coaches are concerned with their clients' self-esteem and self-improvement. Please scroll down to learn more and to find local motivational life coaches in Portland, ME as well as other information and resources on how you can meet your personal goals.

What It Takes to Finally Get On With Your Dreams

By Suzanne Falter-Barns

It seems to me there is only one real and proper way to live a joyful life, and that is to do the thing you are meant to be doing. There are people out there who make it seem like rolling out of bed. But I know from experience -- pursuing your dream 'ain't always so easy.

I spent a good chunk of my adult life avoiding that things I really, secretly, deeply wanted to do. Instead, I vamped in a series of well-paying job that gave me loose credit card privileges, a place to get dressed up for every day, and a vague sense that I was acting like a grown-up. But I kept harboring fantasies of some other, better life. I dreamt about quitting my job and being a cabaret singer, or a musical comedy star, or a novelist. I imagined a great "someday" in my future when I'd be my own boss, richly rewarded for my talents and adored by throngs of loyal fans.

Twenty years later, I can say I'm finally living my dream, and amazingly enough, it didn't just land on me. I actually worked for it intensely hard over the past ten years. Life steered me towards writing, and slowly, I carved out a career for myself. A novel was published, then crashed and burned. Reviews were mixed. Two more novels were written and soundly rejected. A third novel was stopped and started, then stopped again. Ten thousand queries for magazine pieces were floated around New York, a dozen of which were actually published. Agents came and went. Jobs were quit triumphantly, then temp jobs taken in despair. A self-help book got 27 rejections, then was published by a small press. Then a major publisher appeared and bought that book and another one in a six-figure deal. A career was finally, fitfully launched.

What I see now is that living my dream is far from a perfect arrangement. Only yesterday I got a grumpy piece of hate mail from someone who'd read a magazine excerpt of my book and despised it. And self-help book two is still sitting on the floor in some editor's office, waiting for its moment in the sun. It's still hard, even after all of this, to sit down and face the blank page every morning. What I see is that there are potholes on this road, just like any other, and I simply have to ride through them.

The bottom line is that at the end of the day, this particular road leaves me feeling free and clean. I am not left beaten up at the end of the day. Instead, I have a content feeling in my soul. I live in peace, instead of wanting -- even though, ironically enough, it means less financial security, far more personal risk, and living in a permanent state of aching vulnerability. But, to paraphrase M. Scott Peck's wonderful book, The Road Less Traveled, who said the point of life was to make you happy all the time?

The way I figure it, we've got a clear cut choice. We either do the thing we were meant to be doing, or we don't. Now, for some of us, figuring out exactly what that thing is is hard. We carry around warring voices in our heads,...

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